Mike Robuck

Verizon's field technicians are now keeping their distance in regards to new installations of the company's Fios service. "Fios in a box" allows customers to self-install their services; Verizon's techs only enter a customer's home if the situation is critical. Fios in a box allows a service technician that is working outside of a subscriber's home to determine whether the fiber can be connected without needing to enter the house. If that's the case, the service tech rigs the cable from the nearest pole using crushable fiber that can be fed through a customer's window or door.

While there's been plenty of reports in regards to how service providers' networks have withstood the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, there hasn't been a lot of focus on how carriers pivoted internally to keep their employees safe and their customers connected to the services they rely on. Verizon's core crisis response team started preparing for the coronavirus' impact during the first week of March. On March 11, Verizon's leaders were briefed that most of the company's employees, which total 135,000, would need to start working from home.

The spike in network traffic is starting to flatten with subscribers settling into their work from home (WFH) routines. Comcast's residential broadband traffic increases were starting to plateau in most of its markets, including in cities such as San Francisco and Seattle that were among the first to implement stay-at-home measures.

Driven in part by video conferencing, broadband usage spiked to a record high on Easter Sunday (April 12), according to data from OpenVault. Easter Sunday downstream consumption hit 16.3 GB per subscriber, which marked an increase of almost 16% over the previous Sunday (14.1 GB) and of 37.9% over March 1 (11.8 GB), the latter of which was before COVID-19 social distancing measures started to take effect. OpenVault said upstream usage per subscriber on Easter Sunday was 0.97 GB, up 18.6% over the previous Sunday upstream high of 0.81 GB on April 5 and 51.7% over the 0.64 GB on March 1.

Charter Communications added 119,000 new internet subscribers in March. Charter is offering free internet access for 60 days during the coronavirus pandemic, so it remains to be seen how many of those new subscribers will stick with it after the free access ends.  Aside of those net additions, Charter said in its filing that paying net adds also increased in March compared to the same month a year ago.

Cisco's Kevin Wollenweber has turned into a COVID-19 sleuth of sorts over the past few weeks as he tracks the virus' impact on service provider networks via some of the major internet peering exchanges. Overall, Wollenweber, Cisco's vice president of service provider networking, said the world's networks are handling the increased traffic related to the coronavirus outbreak well.

By most accounts, internet networks are holding up just fine in the face of increased usage due to the impact of the coronavirus, but that could change over the coming weeks. According to research by Nokia Deepfield that started the week of March 9, networks have seen an increase of 20% to 40% during peak usage in impacted regions. As the coronavirus has stretched across the globe, networks have seen increased usage due to total lock downs of citizens in some countries, more employees working from home and increased gaming and streaming by kids home from school.

Compared to some of the new-fangled technologies, fiber is old-school, but it's the connective tissue for most of the new services and applications. Whether it's fiber-to-the-premise or home, long-haul fiber, metro fiber rings, fiber to a cell tower or small cell, the world's networks increasingly rely on fiber. "Fiber leads all of the businesses that we have," said CenturyLink's Ed Morche, president of strategic enterprise and government markets.

Black Friday and Cyber Week broadband shoppers showed a marked preference for faster broadband speeds. Along with the supposed screaming deals offered by retailers, both online and at brick and mortar locations, some internet service providers were also serving up discounts after Thanksgiving. IMA Research looked at more than 10,000 orders that were fulfilled by ISPs during that time frame and found that 35% of the consumers picked speeds of 100 Mbps or higher, indicating the need for speed for ultra-high definition TV and gaming.

CenturyLink is defining itself as the go-to provider of fiber-based services for business customers, according to CenturyLink CEO Jeff Storey. "We know that when we have a building on-net, our fiber-based services provide a better, more reliable and higher margin solution than competing infrastructure," Storey said on the earnings conference call. "Fiber beats twisted-pair copper, hybrid fiber-coax, and it beats wireless, whether it's 5G or not, fiber wins. It's highly flexible and increasing speeds, it is secure and really is the basis for all the other competing technologies.